Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts

Friday, December 6, 2013

Nandita and Alyssa's Weekly Update

Hello, this is Nandita and Alyssa from Mrs. Clayton’s class. We’re here to tell you about our amazing week. We both had an especially great time during P.E, Science Lab, and Reader’s Workshop. To find out more about what we did during our fantastic week, keep reading!

In P.E., we had Fun day! Fun day is after your class is done with all of their classes in swimming. We got to do fun cool things like diving, splashing and other fun things like that. We did so many activities, diving, going on the yellow slide and rode on those mats on top of the water. We saw a lot of boys that were playing basketball. (Some boys threw the ball from the top of the slide before they rode down.) The most popular activity the boys played was water polo. We thought that swimming with the fins were very fun too! We just wish that we could play tag games in water on Fun day. Sadly that was our last Fun day.

In science, we continued learning about the digestive system. We watched a Bill Nye video to learn some more about our last science experiment. Did you know that the digestive system starts before you even put the food in your mouth? It’s true. When you look at, smell, or even think about food, your mouth starts making saliva. The saliva helps to break down the food while it’s in your mouth. The food is now called chyme. Now, the chyme is that the food goes down into your stomach, where hydrochloric acid breaks down the food even more. After that, the food goes through your small intestine, (which is actually the longer one), and into your large intestine. (The shorter one.) There, all the nutrients are absorbed from the food. When this is done, well, you will have to go to the bathroom.

This week, we also started our nonfiction unit in Reader’s Workshop. Everybody picked a subject they wanted to learn about, or that they knew they could write a lot about. Dogs were a very popular topic. Once we’ve done as much research as possible, we will all write two pages about our subject. This is a really exciting unit for us, because we can learn a lot of information on subjects or topics that we like, or that we did not know much about. Right now we are gathering information on a sticky note. Later, it will turn into a wonderful masterpiece of true facts. We cannot wait to see everyone's writing.

Thank you for taking your time to read this Weekly Update. We hope you enjoyed reading about our Fun Day, Science Lab, and Reader’s Workshop this week. If you liked this, you should read more of the Weekly Updates from Mrs. Clayton's class! Have a wonderful, wacky weekend!

Friday, October 25, 2013

Kasym and Julia's Weekly Update...

Hi, this is Julia and Kasym and we are here with your Weekly Update! We had a wonderful, wacky, and weird week, so we wanted to tell you all about it! First, we had a interesting, confusing and entertaining day in math. Then, we had a cool, fantastic, and awesome day at the Science Centre. (That was our favorite part of the week!) Last but not least, we had a fun, interesting, and relaxing day in RLA. This week was loads of fun, so read to find out what we did during our amazing week! On Monday, we had math. We were learning how to estimate division problems, but we also learned what all the numbers in a division problem are actually called. The first number in a division problem is called the dividend. The second number is called the divisor and the answer is called the quotient. The trick that Mrs. Clayton (our teacher) gave us is: the way to remember the dividend is the first number and the first number is usually the bigger one and dividend is the longer word. That tells you that the second number is the quotient or the divisor. We have just memorized that, but the first trick has helped me (Kasym) at least. After we had done that, we learned how to estimate the quotients. First you have to see if the divisor can go into the five dividend using an easy multiplication fact. When you have found it, you work it out. Say it was 456/5 you would see that 456 can be rounded down to 450 which is easy to divide by five. goes into 45, 9 times so you write 9 then add on the extra 0 so you get 90. That is your answer. It is as I said a little harder than multiplication when you do hard ones like 454/6 or 765/3 but when you get the hang of it, it is quite easy. On Tuesday, we went to the Science Center and it was amazing. We learned heaps of new stuff like: did you know that rock-candy has a much higher boiling point than water? To make the lollipops you have to get seven tablespoons of sugar and put it in the sauce pan. You also have to get two tablespoons of water, then three tablespoons of corn syrup. You could add 1 drop of flavoring, and/or 1 drop of coloring to the saucepan. Most people did this, but it was optional.  You stir it up and then you put the saucepan on a warm plate with the temperature at medium. You leave it on medium until it boils, then you turn the temperature to low and leave it for ten minutes. You have to be stirring the whole time though. When it is finished, you have to pour it into moulds really quickly or it hardens in the pot. Some of our helpers had to pour it for us because we were too scared. Even when we had got it in the moulds, we had to wait fifteen to twenty minutes before we could eat it. We stuck toothpicks in it, but since you have to wait fifteen to twenty minutes, our arms got kind of tired. Then it was free time, so we could go anywhere we wanted to go! One of my favorite bits was this wheel that we played on. You were supposed to run on the wheel, but it was much more fun if you just tried to stand (which none of us could). It looked like a massive doggy pile when all of us fell over.  We also watched a really cool electrical show and OUR TEACHER was part of it. She got in this metal cage and the electricity got attracted to the metal so it was electrified! Thankfully our teacher didn’t get hurt, but she did hear loud noises even though she had ear-muffs on. On Wednesday we had RLA. The class did two things in one. First of all, we got new reading partners. Both partners are the same reading level, you’ll see why Hopefully everyone likes their reading partners too! Second, we (the two reading partners) got to pick out a book, and read that book for the week! I think everybody loves the book that they chose.  I (Julia) love the book that I chose at least! We got to see who our reading partners were first.  I thought it was fun peering down the list and looking up and down to see my name, then see who was my reading partner. We talked with our reading partners about what our favorite genre is, who our favorite author is, etc. Then we got to go to the fifth-grade group room and pick out our books! Mrs. Clayton told us that the genre had to be Realistic Fiction. For some people it took them a second to find the book they wanted, but for other people, they just couldn’t find the right book. There are soooo many books to choose from, that you don’t just want to pick one, but many! The fifth grade group room had every book a person would need! I would want to see someone read all of those books. I think that it would take them at least 5 years! It was also hard when we had to choose a book at our reading level, because some of us (I know for sure me) wanted to get a book from a level way harder than my reading level! Finally, when everything was settled, and everyone had a book, we got to read that book anywhere in the group room we wanted! Mrs. Clayton went around taking pictures, and I guarantee that she will put those pictures onto the class blog. I hope that everybody is into their books already! Both Kasym and I are already into our books! Now our superb week has come to an end! Waaaa! Our week, you can see, has been so splendid that we just had to write sooooooo much. We hope that all of you loved this week’s Weekly Update. We enjoyed math, reading, and especially going to the Science Centre, so that’s why we choose to write all about these things! Again this is the end of the Weekly Update, and I don’t want to make it that long, so we hope you had a fun time reading this and next week you will hear about what we did through Oct. 28-31! Once again we hope you enjoyed. Please comment and give us any ideas on what we could do better next time.

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Amber and Vainavi's Weekly Update....

Hello, this is Amber and Vainavi. Today we will be telling you about our fantastic week! We will tell you what we did that made each day so special. Last but not least, why we enjoyed what we did so much. With the help of our wonderful teacher Mrs. Clayton, we did many fun and educational things like swimming, Mad Scientists and our unit three math test! On Monday, we had our first swimming lesson with Ms. Wenstrom and Ms. Bell. Hopefully, no one felt embarrassed doing the solo swim in a certain stroke. I bet that everyone hated it when we had to go to the cold, freezing shower before we went into the pool. We mainly liked it when we got to practice our strokes before we did the solo swim. So then we were all warmed up to start our assessment.
On Wednesday and Thursday, we had Mad Scientists! We tried to figure out how many grams it would take to saturate Epsom Salt. We had to shake like crazy to make the salt dissolve before we added more salt. We learned how many grams it would take for the salt to saturate. It was hard to saturate the salt, because we had to first finish shaking the bottle, until the salt dissolved. Then we added more salt until it was saturated. According to us it was like a dance party from shaking so much! It took so long to saturate the Epsom Salt compared to the Kosher Salt. So, that is why we had to finish our experiment on Thursday.

On Thursday, we had our unit three math test. Our math subject was about multiplying larger numbers. To us, the part that wasn’t so easy was multiplying three digit by three digit numbers. We hoped that we aced the test as well as everyone else. We were both stressed out at first, but it was easier than we thought.
Sadly, that was the end of our wonderful and busy week. We had so much fun in these 4 days, that we never even realized how fast it went! Hopefully everybody enjoyed their week as much as we did!

Friday, October 4, 2013

Ryan and Nate's Weekly Update...

Hello, this is Nate and Ryan, and we’re from Mrs.Clayton’s class. The both of us will be doing this week’s Weekly Update. There were three subjects that we did that we wanted to  write about this week. Read about what happened during these subjects, in our sensational week.

First off, on Tuesday in writing, we all glued our final copies of our small seed stories into our covers. We all went around reading each others stories, and commented on them with sticky notes. Luckily, Mrs.Clayton was being really compassionate and generous enough to give each of us four pieces of candy. Did you see how much our writing has improved since our first draft?

Later that day, we had a special guest assembly with Courtney Campbell. Courtney is known around the globe for her hilarious show, “Mustard Pancakes”. She told us stories about a girl named Burp, and her funny childhood, and sang a song that we all had to dance too. If you want to see more, click here to go to her website. She was so much fun. We were very lucky to have her come.

Last but not least, on Thursday and Friday, we learned two different ways to ways to help solve two-digit by two-digit number math problems. We learned the partial products method and the traditional method. Both of us are still getting the hang of the traditional method, but we’re so glad that we could learn it.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our Weekly Update. It was so much fun putting this together for you. Now enjoy your week!   

Friday, September 13, 2013

Noemi and Jade's Weekly Update...

Hello, this is Jade and Noemi, and we’re from Mrs.Clayton’s class. We are doing the Weekly Update for this week. We hope you all will enjoy!

One of the things that was outstanding this week was science lab with Mr.Kimzey. We conducted a really cool experiment. The materials were yeast, sugar, hot water, balloon etc. We first added yeast, sugar, and hot water in the first boiling flask. Then we mixed it. After that, we put a balloon on the boiling flask. We waited and waited. Then, the balloon started blowing up because we added sugar and the yeast ate the sugar so it got activated. In the other boiling flask, we did not add sugar so it did not blow up. It was so much fun.

Another thing that we really enjoyed was photo day. One reason we really enjoyed it, was that we got to dress up in pretty outfits. Another reason we enjoyed photo day was that we could also see the pretty outfits everyone wore for their photo.

The last amazing thing we did this week was Ice Cream Genre Challenge. One reason we really liked it was that it gave us a chance to explore genres we would have never touched. We also really liked that the prize was an ice cream party because both Jade and I really like ice cream. We also like that eight is a reasonable amount of books to read in twelve weeks.

Sadly, this week has come to an end and so has our weekly update. This week has been really fun in Mrs.Clayton’s class. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as Jade and I have enjoyed sharing the best parts of our week. Have a fantastic weekend!

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Thursday, August 29, 2013

New Best Friend...

Here's our first picture prompt!  On your blog, create a new post that thoroughly answers this question.  Remember that we always reread our work before publishing.  Have you put in your best effort?  Were you creative? Did you answer the questions thoroughly and thoughtfully?  I can't wait to see who you choose as your new best friend!